Tuesday’s crushing defeat of the centrist Clinton/Obama Democratic Party provides an opening for the American left. The next few years are not going to be pretty, but they could be the beginning of something beautiful.

An estimated 2 million Americans age 60 and older are in debt from unpaid student loans, whether from money borrowed long ago or from more recent borrowing to fund degrees for family members. And some are having their Social Security payments garnished as a result.

A sizable chunk of the adult population is going to punch a clock until they keel over in the office parking lot and get hauled off in the company dumpster. And those are the lucky ones, the so called baby boomers. By the time we get to the millennials it’ll be even worse because the economy will have been ravaged by 25 or 30 years of austerity leaving the proles to scrape by on hardtack and gruel.

The Massachusetts senator caused a stir this week after the Third Way think tank wrote an op-ed Monday warning Democrats not to follow Warren “over the populist cliff.” But what’s truly behind this resentment toward Warren? Fear, of course.

After The Washington Post mocked the idea of Americans facing a looming retirement crisis, the inimitable senator from Massachusetts took to her chamber’s floor to remind us that talking about Social Security benefits isn’t about “math, [it’s] about our values.”

Plenty of government programs had rough starts, but no one remembers anymore; mysterious phallic sculptures are disappearing from a tourist site in Iran; meanwhile, America is nowhere near as diverse as we think. These discoveries and more after the jump.

When female writers disappeared from the Wikipedia heading “American novelists,” more than a few eyebrows were raised; Pvt. Bradley Manning being revoked as grand marshal of the San Francisco Gay Pride parade proves that the military-industrial complex rules all; meanwhile, another price-fixing scandal reminiscent of Libor is about to explode. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Politico’s piece on New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson implied she was a “bitchy woman character”; fossil fuels may never be depleted and this could be the best and worst thing to happen; meanwhile, violence is less rampant on YouTube than on television programs. These discoveries and more after the jump.

The president gave wealthy Americans “a most generous reduction in their estate taxes” while telling Social Security beneficiaries “to live with smaller benefit checks,” William Greider writes in The Nation.

Reading mass media news articles is unhealthy and causes unhappiness, so stop it; Americans want to know more about socialism, as evidenced by Merriam-Webster’s two most searched entries in 2012; meanwhile the Swedes were dissatisfied with gendered pronouns and have officially incorporated a third, gender-neutral one into their language. These discoveries and more after the jump.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Economist Michael Hudson attacks Obama’s proposed cuts. Also on the program: the fight to keep Monsanto from polluting Hawaii’s natural wonders, a college degree ain’t what it used to be, and a new movie documents the legal showdown over medical marijuana.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: Economist Michael Hudson attacks Obama’s proposed cuts. Also on the program: the fight to keep Monsanto from polluting Hawaii’s natural wonders, a college degree ain’t what it used to be, and a new movie documents the legal showdown over medical marijuana.

The senator stood before a crowd of retirees, veterans and their supporters Thursday to point out that the president’s proposal for a “Chained CPI” adjustment to the calculation of retirement benefits would wreak destruction on the lives of elderly and disabled Americans.

The new cost-of-living index proposed in Obama’s latest budget is really a means to push lower living standards on people who need Social Security, University of Missouri economist Michael Hudson says.

John Boehner, speaker of the House, revealed why it’s politically naive for the president to offer up cuts in Social Security in the hope of getting Republicans to close some tax loopholes for the rich.

If we had a government capable of honoring the collective desire for more jobs, smaller deficits, more education funding, reduced reliance on fossil fuels and Medicare and Social Security benefits preserved, our future could be guaranteed at tax time in no time.

The president is following through on his intention to abandon the welfare of elderly and disabled Americans in a budget deal that would cut $130 billion from programs like Social Security over the next 10 years, and that could starve the system in the long run.

Daniel McGowan, an Earth Liberation Front activist, was imprisoned last week for writing a HuffPo post; Fox News claims that Rutgers University firing its abusive basketball coach is evidence of cultural decline; and no, Bitcoin is apparently not the future of currency. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Thanks to Speaker of the House John Boehner and his fellow Republicans in the chamber, there is serious legislative opposition to the attack on Social Security that President Obama proposed in his budget plan this week.

This week, President Obama proposed to reduce the national deficit by adopting a new formula for adjusting for inflation in Social Security payments. Robert Reich points out that it would be “stingier than the current one.” Frankly, it would destroy Social Security over the next two decades as prices for goods and services rose and the program wasn’t allowed to keep up.

In the name of compromise, bipartisanship and the satisfaction of a ruling class that is indifferent to the suffering of ordinary Americans, President Obama is ready to sell parts of Social Security and Medicare in his attempt to strike an annual budget that satisfies Republicans and reduces the long-term deficit by $1.8 trillion over 10 years, administration officials say.

Recent polls show Americans would rather reduce the deficit by raising taxes than by cutting Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, education and transportation. Yet Congress seems incapable of making that kind of deal. Some 65 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on large corporations, but both parties are heading in precisely the opposite direction.

George W. Bush’s paintings do not reveal anything about the Iraq War, despite our wishing that they did; absurdly, the main argument against gay marriage is the state’s supposed need to regulate procreation; meanwhile, the entire Senate voted against Social Security cuts and the media said nothing. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Trumka recently spoke with The National Memo about the sequester’s automatic budget cuts, the danger of cuts to Social Security, the Keystone XL pipeline, immigration reform, President Obama and how to defend labor in an era of attacks on the right to organize.

Memo to congressional Republicans: You might want to stray from GOP talking points and stick to the facts when facing off against a Nobel Prize-winning economist unless you want to be called out for falsehoods.

Sequestration is only the start. What the tea party set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government—“drown it in the bathtub,” in the words of their guru Grover Norquist.

Brace yourself. In coming weeks you’ll hear there’s no serious alternative to cutting Social Security and Medicare, raising taxes on middle class, and decimating what’s left of the federal government’s discretionary spending on everything from education and job training to highways and basic research.

So much for the “Grand Bargain”—or at least for the not-so-grand gutting of Social Security and Medicare that the “very serious” thought-leaders of Washington political and media circles have always found so appealing.